Postal is a software suite designed for benchmarking SMTP and POP protocols. It enables users to measure the performance and throughput of their email systems in a variety of scenarios.
Postal suite is a software package that includes two programs: Postal and Rabid. Postal, also known as the mad postman, is designed to deliver emails as quickly as possible using the SMTP protocol in order to test mail server performance. Rabid, or the mad Biff, on the other hand, is designed to eat the emails using the POP protocol as fast as possible to measure POP server performance.
One of the key features of Postal is that all messages sent through it have MD5 checksums appended. Rabid checks these MD5s to ensure that the messages are not being corrupted during the process. To achieve better performance, Postal applies random transformations to a list of user names in order to generate FROM and TO addresses. This is because storing the entire email address would take up a lot of memory and make the benchmark invalid.
Another important feature of Postal is that it uses random data for the subject and body of each email. In addition, the program also uses a specific header field, X-Postal, to enable easy filter out of such emails using procmail. This helps to prevent accidentally sending test emails to personal email addresses.
Installing the Postal software package is straightforward for Debian users. They can simply use the command “apt-get install postal”. If they want to install a different version than the one that comes with their Debian installation, they can build a Debian package in the usual way. For Red Hat, there’s a portslave.spec file available to build with the “rpm -b” command. For Solaris, the command “make -C sun” can be used. Other Unix users can set up the software using “./configure; make install”.
The latest version of Postal suite includes minor changes to the documentation. It’s also possible to build the program without SSL support, which improves flexibility for users. Overall, Postal suite is highly efficient, easy to use, and comes with several useful features for testing mail server performance.
One of the key features of Postal is that all messages sent through it have MD5 checksums appended. Rabid checks these MD5s to ensure that the messages are not being corrupted during the process. To achieve better performance, Postal applies random transformations to a list of user names in order to generate FROM and TO addresses. This is because storing the entire email address would take up a lot of memory and make the benchmark invalid.
Another important feature of Postal is that it uses random data for the subject and body of each email. In addition, the program also uses a specific header field, X-Postal, to enable easy filter out of such emails using procmail. This helps to prevent accidentally sending test emails to personal email addresses.
Installing the Postal software package is straightforward for Debian users. They can simply use the command “apt-get install postal”. If they want to install a different version than the one that comes with their Debian installation, they can build a Debian package in the usual way. For Red Hat, there’s a portslave.spec file available to build with the “rpm -b” command. For Solaris, the command “make -C sun” can be used. Other Unix users can set up the software using “./configure; make install”.
The latest version of Postal suite includes minor changes to the documentation. It’s also possible to build the program without SSL support, which improves flexibility for users. Overall, Postal suite is highly efficient, easy to use, and comes with several useful features for testing mail server performance.
What's New
Version 0.70: N/A